Richard Wordingham wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "i18n@..." <i18n@...> wrote:
> > Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> > > CMS has become almost uselessly non-prescriptive in the 14th and
> > > especially the 15th ed., and "either is correct" is not a useful
> > > response for someone who wants to know what the standard is.
>
> Sometimes there simply isn't a standard, and a choice may be a matter
> of euphony as much as anything else.

The purpose of a style manual is to regulate a particular press's
publications so that they achieve consistency -- so that the reader is
not distracted by inconsistencies.* When the 14th announced that if a
ms. does not follow CMS style but is self-consistent, the Press will
publish it as is, that was a blow to copyeditors everywhere. (Especially
since Chicago style is usually extremely sensible and logical -- they've
been refining it for a century now.)

*Johanna Nichols's *Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time* (Chicago,
ca. 1992) is one of the most important works in historical linguistics
of our generation. Yet "chi square" and "chi-square" are found on the
very same page, or on very close pages. That could not have happened in
Mrs. Turabian's day.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...